GLM is actually quite expensive in actual practice because it's not very token efficient. I've yet to find a way to run it on a monthly sub reliably for cheaper than Codex.

Neuralwatt was cheap (but slow) but they cranked their price.

Ollama monthly sub is speedy but doesn't offer a lot of quota.

Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and OpenAI are a better deal.

> I've yet to find a way to run it on a monthly sub reliably for cheaper than Codex.

Matches my experience, I got their Pro subscription and while I enjoyed the model itself a lot and while their ZCode harness is also pretty nice, it gave me less tokens for similar amounts of money that Anthropic would give me on a subscription: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

I'm yet to try out Kimi, but if their subscription were to be anywhere comparable to Anthropic/OpenAI, I might just switch over because competition is good.

DeepSeek V4 Pro is really affordable per-token but regularly kept making mistakes in the tasks I gave it. I mean I could at least afford the tokens to go over the work a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th time and gradually fix most of the issues, but it was a very frustrating mode of work.

I know GLM is relatively expensive and so is Kimi, in comparison to those DeepSeek V4 pro and flash are a godsend and are absolutely good value.

I'm on the Z.ai quarterly subscription plan (got in when the price was lower) and I was using it through opencode and it was like I'd only get maybe an hour of usage (if that, sometimes) before it would time out and say come back in 5 hours. Now I'm using it through their Zcode harness and I rarely hit that - they say they're giving 1.5x usage if you use it through Zcode, sometimes seems like even more than that.

I found this with kimi k2.7 as well: on paper it should be quite cheap, but it's not because it uses a lot of tokens for quite simple tasks

re:

> Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and OpenAI are a better deal.

Maybe. I am on a $20/month Anthropic subscription this month but I also use Claude Code frequently with Deepseek v4 flash and pro, GML5.2. For simple work Deepseek v4 flash is so nice because it is fast.

What you say is true however, the US hyper-scalers are still (desperately?) subsidizing subscriptions for market share to boost there valuations.

I really want to see AI inference costs approach zero, and I think I just need to wait a few years to see that.

I don't know, DeepseekV4 is so dirt cheap that it makes lots of sense to use over Sonnet.

Compared to the flagship models GLM is still a 1/10th the price on the task I have tested.